For the next two day-night periods, there was no recurrence of the strange blobs and their noises. Jill's program had still not decided what the things were, but it was certain they were not intelligent life forms, since an intelligent being would certainly want to explore such a strange artifact as Jill.
Then Jill's sonar, peering ahead through the endless ocean, heard a response to its searching pings. They had the same pitch and structure as the noises that had been heard nearly twelve hours ago, strong, loud, and almost raucous.
*HI!!! HI!!! HI!!!* said Roaring*Hot*Vermillion.
«Who are you talking to?» asked Clear«»White«»Whistle.
*It's the big floating rock! It's talking now! I think it wants to play!*
The red cloud changed its body ripples from the slow, wave-leaning gait that it had been sharing with Clear«»White«»Whistle and slithered off toward the distant pinging ahead.
Jill's sonar system saw the distant blobs separate. One came directly at it at high speed. Jill increased her interrogation rate and switched to a modified chirp in an attempt to pick up shape information. The blob was about three meters wide, ten meters long, and one meter thick, but it had almost the same density as the ocean and had no discernable internal structure.
«Careful!» came the call from the distant white cloud. «It might be a new type of Grey¤Boom! It might explode and catch you.»
The thought slowed the advance of Roaring*Hot*Vermillion, but didn't decrease the volume of its voice, which raised to a shout.
*HI!! WANT TO SURF!?!*
Jill took in the sound, then echoed it back, more softly since it was limited to a hundred watts of power by its jury-rigged sonar system.
"HI! Want to surf?!" Jill said, then waited.
Roaring*Hot*Vermillion paused a second, nonplussed at hearing its own voice, weak though the echo was.
*HI!!*
"Hi!"
*HI! HO! HI!*
"Hi! Ho! Hi!"
Roaring*Hot*Vermillion caught on quickly. This thing obviously didn't know how to communicate, so it was limited to repeating what it heard. The red cloud had come across others of its kind that fed around volcanic vents at distant points in the ocean that had spoken such strange dialects that it took it almost a light-cycle to get accustomed to each other's slang so they could talk together.
This strange thing didn't seem to know anything about talking, but it still was smarter than the hunters and flitters, who had their own sounds and could not imitate the spoken voice. This thing could even imitate Roaring*Hot*Vermillion's own overtone patterns. The obvious way to see if it could be taught to talk was take it through some simple mathematical logic. First the numbers, then simple combinatorial mathematics, then formal logic, then with a few physical referents such as you, me, water, dirt, sky, and some diagrams on the bottom, and they should be conversing in a light-period.
*One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven!*
There was a pause as the numbers trilled through the water, each one, with its multiple tonal and pulse-code pattern a living example of the concept of the number it represented. The word "Three" was a melodic triplet of sounds with each note given its own triple-tongue beat. Each number had its own set of overtones that were distinctive as bell, violin, and brass. The number "Seven" was a manifold wonder that Jill saved in its pristine acoustic beauty to present to David when he was in the mood to compose.
*One plus one equals two.*
*One plus two equals three.*
"One plus three equals four," interjected Jill.
The red cloud turned itself inside out.
*HEY!!! VERY GOOD! Won't take long for you to learn!* There was an outpouring of sound beamed off into the distance.
*Come here, Clear«»White«»Whistle! This strange hard floater is as smart as a new-formed one!*
*One plus One plus One equals...* said the red cloud, waiting for the answer.
"...Three," dutifully responded Jill.
*Three TIMES One equals Three!* said Roaring*Hot*Vermillion, jumping from addition to multiplication. Jill caught on instantly.
"Two TIMES Three equals Six!" said Jill, almost triumphantly.
*zzzzzzzzzzt!!!* came an explosive sound.
*SsSsSsIiIiIiXxXxXx!* said the red cloud, enunciating each trill and overtone with exaggerated care.
"SSSsssIIIiiiXXXxxx," said Jill, its electronics still stumbling over the acoustic nuances of the word.
*zzzzzzzzt!!* exploded the red cloud. Jill tried again.
"SsSsSsIiIiIiXxXxXx," said Jill's sonar finally.
*I do believe its GOT it!!!*
The red blob turned itself inside out again, and dashed off to meet the still approaching white form.
*It's SMART!!! I think I'll keep it!!! I'll name it Floating¤Rock!*
«It may not want to be kept. Besides, Floating¤Rock doesn't seem to swim too well. It won't be able to follow you around.»
*Oh!!! Right! Well, you can have it! I'm going surfing!* The red cloud swam off into the distance.
Jill took advantage of the interlude to inform the crew of its find. They came crowding to the cockpit windows to see the giant alien creatures. There was a large red alien swimming away, while a slightly smaller white cloud hovered in the water at a distance.
"They are definitely intelligent, despite their amorphous shape," reported Jill.
"Do they have name?" asked Arielle.
"I haven't progressed that far yet," said Jill. "Even when I have learned their names I doubt you would be able to pronounce them. The red one is quite raucous, so I'll call it Loud Red. The other uses a higher-pitched whistling tone, so I'll call it White Whistler."
"How can such large aliens exist in these barren seas?" asked Katrina. "We've been over all of Roche and most of Eau and taken lots of samples. I'm sure you and I would never have missed seeing a life form, even a single-celled one."
"I suspect that the only life to be found is right around the active volcano vents," said Jill. "Life here never developed photosynthesis, so all you have are animals. Even a one-celled animal cannot survive except right around the vent fields where the energy source is."
"It's like the little colonies of strange sea creatures that cluster around the sea-bottom vents back on Earth," said George. "They live off the hydrogen sulfide escaping from the vents. There is even a large wormlike creature with no mouth. It gets its food from hydrogen-sulfide-eating bacteria living in its skin."
"Well, these creatures are even weirder than those we have on Earth," said Richard.
"Look," said Arielle. "White Whiftler is coming clofer."
Clear«»White«»Whistle approached the strange metallic-tasting beast. There should be many things that Clear«»White«»Whistle could learn from this strange thing that was hard like a rock but floated. For instance, there were those strange things inside Floating¤Rock that had stiff sections connected by joints and moved around. Since Floating¤Rock had eaten the Stiff¤Movers, perhaps they would be tasty, but Clear«»White«»Whistle had never seen anything like them in this region of the ocean. If Floating¤Rock could be taught to talk, it would tell them where to find the stick-food. Clear«»White«»Whistle continued the lesson.
«Three times Two equals Six.»
"Two times Three equals Six. One times Six equals Six. Two plus Four equals Six. Three plus Three equals Six. One plus Five equals Six," said Jill, trying to make it clear that she had figured out the addition and multiplication tables. So far, there were no numbers greater than Seven. They must use an octal numbering system. There was one way to find out.
"Four plus Four equals... " said Jill and paused, waiting for the answer.
«One-OOOhhh,» came the answer. Jill had been prepared for the One, but this was the first time she had heard the haunting emptiness of the zero. It sounded like the unheard echo of an invisible ghost.
Jill decided to speed things up. The next step was the subtraction tables. "One BEEP One equals OOOhhh. BEEP equals..."
Clear«»White«»Whistle was impressed. Floating¤Rock was now asking questions.
«BEEP equals minus. One minus One equals OOOhhh.»
Jill jumped from mathematics to logic. "One equals One."
«Yes.»
"That must be either 'yes's or 'correct'," said Jill to itself. "Now to find the negative..."
"One equals Two," the sonar beeped.
«No.»
...and more words were added to Jill's all-retentive memory as the red sun set once again behind the mountain in the sky.
Katrina Kauffmann had been following Jill's conversation with extreme interest, but she was more interested in the alien's bodies than their minds.
"Do you think we could get a sample of one of them?" she asked Jill. "I'd really like to find out what they're made of. I'll get into my suit and slip out the lock while you keep them talking."
"I would advise against that," said Jill. "These beasts weigh about ten tons and are intelligent. Even if you could snatch a sample I'm not sure you would survive to bring it back."
"Then ask them for a sample," said Katrina, sure that her request would be granted. "Tell them it is of vital importance for my research."
Jill started to protest, but Katrina had made her way back to the suit locker while she was talking and was starting to put on her suit. Her imp was kept busy scrambling to keep out of the way.
It took a few minutes for Jill to get the concept across to White Whistler, but as Katrina had expected, the alien readily acquiesced. After a thorough checkout by a sleepy-eyed Shirley, Katrina cycled through the lock with a specimen container, a pair of scissors, and a syringe. As she approached the alien, bobbing in the icy liquid, she began to realize just how big these creatures were. The fact that there were no eyes to focus her attention on was one of the more bothersome aspects of meeting the jellyfishlike creature. She could feel and hear the multitude of pings and whistles passing through her body as long thick appendages grew from the sides of White Whistler and nearly surrounded her on all sides, each appendage emitting sounds as she was thoroughly scanned. One of the thick appendages turned into an inquisitive flexible finger that wandered over the specimen bottles and her tools, while another one felt her over thoroughly. Jill kept up a constant conversation with the alien as each item was examined and many words were added to their joint vocabulary. Satisfied with its inspection, the alien withdrew slightly and a strange voice came from the imp on Katrina's shoulder as Jill translated.
«What do 'scissors's and 'syringe' do?»
"The scissors cut..." she held up the scissors and snipped them rapidly, then she carefully cut a tiny portion from the frayed end of her safety rope. Jill translated, and an action word was added to their joint vocabulary. The alien extended a milky-white tendril and pulled the piece of rope inside its body, tasted it for a second and spat it out.
"The syringe sucks..." Katrina worked the plunger and brought it near the surface of a nearby appendage so it could feel the stream of sea-water shooting from the end of the large needle. Before she could move to avoid it, the appendage impaled itself on the needle and the syringe was half-full of milky white liquid.
"Oh!" said Katrina, "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to do that until you were ready! Are you hurt?"
«Syringe...sucks,» said a quiet voice through the imp. Katrina felt an appendage surround her hand and firm up. Gently, but with great power, her fingers were removed from the syringe. A portion of the appendage formed into a crude hand which took hold of the operating end of the syringe. The piston was pushed down, and the milky-white liquid was expelled back into the alien. Katrina watched, still frightened by her slip, but her fright turned into queasiness as she watched the alien jab the syringe again and again into its body to suck up a little bit of its insides, then squirt them out again. It soon tired of the toy and handed the syringe back to Katrina.
«Syringe...sucks.»
Katrina looked in the syringe. It was empty. She persevered.
"Could I please have a specimen?" she asked, extending the syringe toward the whale-sized creature. There was a pause as Jill translated.
«Yes,» came the reply. «Do not need cut or suck.» The alien extended a tendril toward her. As Katrina watched, a portion about three centimeters back from the tip necked down and pinched off, leaving a milky sausage floating in the water. She pulled in her specimen bottle by its lanyard. Opening the fliptop, she approached the sausage and tried to push it into the bottle with her glove. The small speck of white stuff became agitated and emitted a shrill cry. Changing shape in random patterns, it clumsily swam away out of her reach. Katrina tried to catch it, but it soon swam back to the large blob that it had come from and buried itself into the surface, rejoining its lost protoplasmic family.
«Stop!» came the alien command through her imp. Another tendril formed, and this time the tip of it was inserted in the specimen bottle before the arm necked off. The tendril backed out of the specimen bottle and Katrina quickly closed the flip-lid, and the sausage specimen was trapped.
Katrina, holding her prize in one hand, pulled on her safety rope with the other, and soon was shooting through the icy water back to the air lock in the side of Dragonfly. As she moved, the specimen bottle started to scream like a tiny baby being flayed alive by a sadistic savage.
Katrina entered the airlock and was about to close the outside door when she stopped. She held specimen bottle up in front of her face and watched the little white cloud inside. Now that she had stopped moving, the screams had stopped. They were replaced by tiny whistles and pings. The cloud seemed to shift in shape and acted as if it were exploring the confines of the bottle, especially the hinge and lip of the fliptop.
"Are you sure White Whistle understood the meaning of 'specimen'?" she asked her imp.
"I requested a small, unimportant subset of the set that composes White Whistler," said Jill. "Through our discussions on logic and mathematics we have developed very precise joint understanding of the words 'small' and 'unimportant'. I am also fairly sure from its response that it understood the term 'subset of the set that comprises White Whistler.' "
"The reason I ask is that this specimen acts more like a miniature alien than just a chunk of flesh or blood. Are you sure that it didn't 'bud' and give us one of its offspring? I think I'll leave the bottle in the freezer for a while until we clear this up. The last thing I want to be is a kidnapper and vivisectionist."
Darkness fell as Katrina cycled through the lock. Jill turned on its lights, but White Whistler abruptly left and went streaking off after a small sting-ray-like creature that fluttered away in panic. Jill later heard a shrill cry that was cut off abruptly at its peak. White Whistler did not return until Barnard rose again from behind Roche.
"How are you and the aliens doing with the language lessons?" asked Katrina the next day. "I've got some questions I'd like to ask."
"Quite well, Katrina. They are very intelligent creatures. They learn much faster than humans. They make fewer mistakes than humans. They almost never forget, unlike humans..."
"...That's enough! Next thing you know you'll be telling me that they have higher IQ's than we do."
"They do have higher IQ's. I would estimate that their IQ is greater..."
"...I don't want to know!"
"Yes, Katrina."
"Can you converse with them enough yet to ask them about the other fauna and flora in the sea? I've seen distant objects swimming through the sea, but they seemed smaller than these creatures."
"I'll ask Loud Red," said Jill. "It is nearby."
There was a singing sound from the radome at the front of the Magic Dragonfly, and an almost immediate reply from the red cloud in front of the airplane. The imp on Katrina's shoulder translated both sides of the conversation.
"Exist there others, not similar to you? Smaller than you?"
*Yes! Lots! I show you?*
"Yes, please?"
*What mean 'please'?!?*
Jill, who had yet to get across the concept of politeness to these very direct, almost busybody creatures, decided to bypass the question.
"Negate previous statement. Yes. Show us."
The red blob, not bothered a bit by Jill's refusal to answer its question, gave a piercing whistle that carried far out into the deep ocean. After a few seconds the imp on Katrina's shoulder whispered.
"Look at ten o'clock low." There was a burbling sound as Jill adjusted trim and the cockpit windows dipped beneath the surface of the ocean.
Katrina swiveled her head and looked out the left cockpit window. Near the ocean bottom was a long orange snakelike creature, propelling itself rapidly through the water with a sinuous motion of its long narrow body. It shot up toward the surface, contracting in length as it did so. As it approached, Katrina could hear the creature emitting short sharp sounds, like a yipping puppy, although its size was more like that of a St. Barnard. The speeding orange missile hit the Red alien amidships, diving at full speed into the depths of the reddish cloud. There was a reaction and the orange creature, now nearly a sphere, was thrown out and immediately grabbed by some thick red tendrils. There enthused a wrestling match, with loud bellows interspersed with happy-sounding yips.
"George! David!" Katrina hollered over her shoulder. "You ought to come see this. OH! Here comes two more!"
George hopped into the copilot seat and David stood behind them on the flight deck as the three watched the next two orange snakes speed through the water to join the wrestling match. The three orange balls kept the red cloud busy. Sometimes one of the orange creatures would be flung off into the water, where it would spread out from a sphere to a sheet, rapidly came to a stop in the water, then swam back into the fray. After a few minutes the fracas quieted down, with the orange blobs just rubbing slowly back and forth against the surface of the huge red cloud, and making small busy noises.
"They look like cats rubbing up against the legs of their owners," said George. "Do you think they're pets?"
"Three orange things are elements of what set?" asked Jill.
*Three orange things are—* there followed a complex whistle that Jill did not attempt to translate.
"Belong to you?" asked Jill.
*Yes. Help catch food. Pet.* This time Jill felt sure enough of the meaning of the whistle to translate it for the humans.
"Pets know numbers?" asked Jill.
The response to Jill's question was a terrible high-pitched scream that continued as the red cloud literally turned itself inside out. The portion of Loud Red nearest them pushed deep into center of the body and burst out the back end dragging the rest of the body around with it. It split into an opening flower and continued back around, shaping the convoluting body into a twirling ring of red smoke. The screaming activated the orange pets and one of them snaked through the opening in its master's body, yipping as it went. The rotation complete, the smoke ring collapsed, and the screaming subsided as the alien took its normal blob shape. Jill hearing the shocked responses of the humans, reassured them.
"I'm pretty sure that behavior is their equivalent of a laugh. When one of them first did it, I thought that the question I had asked had violated one of their taboos or something and they were mad, but it always seems to happen only when I ask a stupid question."
*One only, but it very smart. Know One and One is Two! We show you!*
The red blob whistled to his pets and one orange sphere swam around to the front between the alien and the Dragonfly. A red tendril snaked out to stand over the orange pet and bobbed up and down as the alien spoke to its pet.
*One plus One is...*
oxTtWwOooooox howled the pet, doing its best to imitate the flouwen speech pattern. Jill thought it had done a respectable job.
"I wonder how much more it knows?" asked David quietly. "It must be interesting having a semi-intelligent pet."
*Two plus Two is...* continued the alien.
oxTtWwOooooox came the reply, and the high-pitched scream startled the humans again as Roaring*Hot*Vermillion laughed again at its favorite joke, its body contorting in its mirth. For a brain that was so rigorously attuned to the perfect exactness of mathematical logic, the pet's completely illogical statement struck it in the same way that a outrageous pun did a literate human. The laughter finally subsided.
*Pets not know numbers. Pets not know words. Pets DUMB!*
"I want a sample from the pets," said Katrina. "See if you can't talk Loud Red into letting us have a piece of one of his dogs, while I get into my suit."
"Let me go," said George. "I need the exercise."
George climbed down from the copilot seat, and squeezing past David, made his way back to the rear of Dragonfly while Jill talked to the red cloud.
George tiptoed through the sleeping quarters on his way to the suit locker, but he wasn't quiet enough. Shirley woke from her catlike slumber, and flipping up the sound-barrier lid to her bunk, rolled out onto the floor in her long johns and got up to go through the suit checkout with George.
"I could have gotten David to do it," protested George.
"And you and he would have rushed through it, missed something, and gotten you killed," said Shirley, yawning half-way through the sentence.
A thoroughly checked out George was cycled through the lock with a sample bottle and a video camera, while Shirley, carefully reading through the check list on the door, prepared the airlock for the next use, then headed back to bed. She did a twisting flip in the low gravity, landed on hands and feet next to her bottom-bunk bed, rolled sideways into the bunk, slid her in under the thrown-back covers, pulled up the blanket, closed the Sound-Bar lid, and was asleep in ten seconds.
George adjusted his buoyancy so that he sank to the bottom and could plod slowly through the water to the front of the plane. It was a long walk through the mucky bottom to the front of the thirty meter long airplane. On the way he passed by many rocks and what looked like coral formations around some fuming vents. As he approached the front of the plane, where the red alien was conversing with Jill, he passed by an extremely large dark-grey rock.
*HELLO!* said the red cloud in his ear, as it spotted him plodding out from under the wing of the airplane. Loud Red came over to greet him. In one tendril it carried a tiny piece of orange stuff. Knowing what to do, the alien grabbed the specimen bottle from the human, and careful not to yank the lanyard tight, opened the bottle and inserted the struggling sample of orange pet.
*I put in bottle! Big pets dumb but listen. Little pets too dumb to listen.*
"I notice that it doesn't call it a piece of pet, just a little pet," said George to his imp, as he felt the three orange blobs start to nuzzle him all over. He felt like a stranger in his first visit to a home with a pack of hunting dogs. They would be friendly, but their noses were so curious that you ended up wet all over. Fortunately his suit protected him from this pack of hounds.
"They seem to be built along the same lines as the aliens," said Jill through his imp. "They are completely amorphous, and any small segment is just like the original, just diminished in capability."
The alien gave the specimen bottle back to George, then swam back to the front of the ship to continue its conversation with Jill. George tucked the bottle away on his belt, and hefting the video camera, moved forward to take some pictures of Loud Red and his orange pets with Dragonfly in the background. Katrina and David in the cockpit looked like air-breathing gold-fish in an inside-out aquarium.
BOOM!!!
George was rocked by a concussion through his suit. Overhead, shooting through the water at great speed, were heavy grey rocks trailing streamers of smoke. The rocks fell to the bottom some sixty meters away, while the streams of smoke settled to the bottom. The streamers came down rapidly, as if they were being driven through the water by internal contraction rather than by floating down in the low gravity. There were many of them, and two of them touched George. The streamers were sticky, and the minute the threads felt George move, they began to pull in their far ends to contract and wrap themselves about his body. Within seconds his arms were pinned. He fell backward into the muck. A grey film crept over his visor. It grew thicker until he was in darkness.
David had been looking in the right direction and had seen the grey rock explode. Dozens of fragments of rock shot through the water, trailing grey threads behind them. Some of the rocks struck the hull of Dragonfly with a thud and fell to the bottom. There was a slam from the back of the plane, a patter of bare feet, and a large heavy-breathing body stood on the flight deck between David and Katrina.
"What happened!" gasped Shirley.
"A rock exploded and has thrown out a net of grey strings," said David.
"Look!" said Katrina. "The alien and his pets are swimming upward at the threads and slipping through the gaps between them."
"The threads are coming down fast," said Shirley.
"The rock must be pulling in its net," said David.
"George!" yelled Shirley. "He's out there somewhere!" She leaned over to peer out the cockpit window. She saw a struggling grey blob on the ocean floor. It rolled over and a specimen bottle bobbed free and floated up to the end of its lanyard. Feeling the motion, the greyness climbed the rope, surrounded the bottle and pulled it back down into the grey mass.
"ITS GOT GEORGE!!!" screamed Shirley, jumping down from the observer's seat and running back down the corridor to the suit lockers. David followed to check her out, but by the time he had made it to the galley, he saw that Arielle and Richard had gotten out of their bunks and were looking around at the excitement with bewildered eyes.
"Richard!" David commanded in a tone that no one had ever heard him use before. "George is in trouble outside. You suit up with Shirley and go out to help. Arielle! You check them both out, then come up front." He turned, only to meet Katrina coming from the front.
"There is grey stuff all over the windows," Katrina reported. It's probably all over the plane, including the door to the airlock. If we open the door, it will creep inside and probably jam the lock." They both hurried to the rear to halt the suiting-up until they could figure a way out of their predicament.
Roaring*Hot*Vermillion, its orange spheroids strangely quiet and nestled close to its body, slowly floated back, keeping a safe distance from the nasty grey threads still falling on Dragonfly. The Grey¤Boom got more than it had bargained for this time, but it was too stupid to realize that it couldn't eat its metallic prey. Floating¤Rock was covered with the sticky grey film, but it could still talk. Roaring*Hot*Vermillion then noticed a wiggling bulge. The Grey¤Boom had caught one of the Stiff¤Movers. It couldn't eat that either because of the hard suit (Roaring*Hot*Vermillion had tried tasting one of the Stiff¤Movers when they had first met—*Nasty!!!*) Unless Floating¤Rock did something, however, the Stiff¤Mover would be stuck, for the grey threads were very persistent and very sticky. Roaring*Hot*Vermillion swam down to the front of the airplane and hollered at Jill's sonar through the grey film.
*You Yell!?!*
"Yell?" queried Jill.
Seeing that Floating¤Rock would or could not do anything about its struggling pet, Roaring*Hot*Vermillion roared to the rescue. Its huge bulk surrounded the struggling figure wrapped in sticky grey. There was a piercing shriek. The grey mass parted to show the head portion of the human spacesuit. Two more shrieks and the grey mass had dissolved into a sonically disintegrated grey cloud. George was free. Jill tried frantically to converse with him through his personal imp, then with his suit imp, but there was no response.
The suited figure headed for the air-lock, jumping gingerly over the grey strands that still lay buried in the muck. It took him a number of minutes to make his way back, and George was wondering how he was going to get past the grey film covering the air-lock door when suddenly a clear spot appeared in the middle of the door. A few more seconds and the spot became an oval as the grey film retreated. George reported what he saw, but was bewildered by Jill's lack of response through his imp. Something must have happened to her sonar system during that loud bang that had caused the grey thread problem.
George's running commentary helped Jill focus the sonic efforts of the Christmas Branch in the airlock, while she repeatedly attempted to contact George through her various links. Nothing seemed to work. Then Jill suddenly realized something. She signaled some special commands to her imp.
Punch-punch-punch. Pinch-pinch-pinch. Punch-punch-punch. The twinges in George's neck finally got through. The imp was signalling to him in Morse code!
"SOS!?!" he said.
Pinch-punch-pinch-pinch. Pause. Pinch. Pause. Punch-punch-punch. George didn't really remember what dash-dot-dash-dash stood for, but if it was followed by E-S, there was no doubt in his mind that it was Y as in YES rather than N as is NO.
"I'm DEAF!" he hollered. For the first time since he was freed he noticed that he was lacking the usual feedback through his auditory system.
Pinch-punch-pinch-pinch. Pause. Pinch... began the imp.
"Enough!" hollered George. "You'll make me black and blue! There's still some grey near the lower left corner of the airlock."
As he said the words, the grey film in the lower left retreated under the sonic bombardment from the Christmas Branch inside.
"All clear!" said George. The lock slowly opened, and George, bending his knees in the muck, took a flying leap at the opening door overhead and sailed in with only a little steering help from the Christmas Branch at the door.
Safely inside, George wondered why the Christmas Branch didn't close the door immediately, but then realized that it was using its sonic capability to clear the area around the hatch from the grey menace. When the Christmas Branch finally returned and activated the airlock cycle, George noticed that most of the upper portion was missing.
"Out hunting grey spooks," he murmured to himself—suddenly annoyed that he couldn't hear what he had just said.
The outer lock closed and he was left in the darkness with the decapitated Christmas Branch. He turned and forced his faceplate close to the small porthole that looked into the inner portions of Dragonfly. It seemed strangely dark, like a grey film was over the window. His bruised eyes finally focused and stared into a pair of beautiful blue pools of concern, surrounded by hands that blocked off the outside light to peer into the deep darkness inside the airlock.
The blue eyes jerked aside and a glaring torch burned into his abused eyeballs. The glare was as painful as the blast of sound that had somehow freed him. The lock was finally purged of the icy cold ammonia-water mixture and George stumbled through the inner door into the warm and friendly interior of Dragonfly. He closed his aching eyes and relaxed his exhausted body, letting it dangle in the firm grasp of Richard while Shirley carefully pulled off his suit. He could hear nothing, but could feel the throb of Richard's jugular through the back of his neck. There was a light touch at one of his ears. He turned his head and peeked through slitted eyelids to see a bloody washcloth wielded by a concerned looking Katrina. He was asleep before they got him to his bunk.
George had to use sign language for a week before his hearing started to return, and even after that the ear tests done at his annual physical showed a large dip in sensitivity at the higher frequencies. The dip in the right ear had been caused by his being on the ROTC rifle team in college. It was now matched by a dip on the left side caused by the cannon blasts from the red cloud that had saved his life.